Article
| April 23, 2019

Scariest Cyberthreats Within The Payments Industry

Unfortunately, most hackers inhabit the payment processing industry. Ironically so, as consumers grow more digitally accepting as a community, hackers and viruses evolve as well.

Though these cyberthreats can be terrifying, security experts have trademarked dozens of anti-virus packages and sound loopholes to help consumers out of these damaging and perhaps even life-threatening situations.

1. DATA BREACHES

Remember the Equifax security breach of 2017? Perhaps you were one of the 146 million consumers that was negatively impacted by this error. It’s possible you panicked that your Social Security Number and License information was leaked to dangerous hackers and cyber-criminals everywhere. It was and for all to see. That’s the thing that’s so scary about data breaches. Once breached, stolen data can remain in the hands of criminals forever. This creates a threat that this data can be used at any time from anywhere, even years after the incident.

This data can be used to create synthetic or false identities, by piecing information together from multiple consumers. Security experts say this is difficult to detect fraud. The files are crafted from multiple sources and one can’t pin down the origin.

Unfortunately, there is no way to prevent this atrocity. One’s best course of action is likely a layered approach that includes firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems. These systems would protect against malware links in email messages and much more.